


And the amethyst stars beneath our feet

by segfault



Category: Stardew Valley (Video Game)
Genre: Blueberries, Exploration, Gen, Original Character(s), The Abandoned Mineshaft Outside of Town, Video Game Mechanics, embarrassingly accurate representation of how i play this game, teenager pov
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-08-31
Updated: 2019-08-31
Packaged: 2020-10-07 21:43:55
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,351
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20464901
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/segfault/pseuds/segfault
Summary: That new farmer in town is boring, except it turns out she's been slaying monsters in the mines this whole time. Abigail wants in.





	And the amethyst stars beneath our feet

I'd never taken much note of the new farmer before. 

Obviously, I'd seen her. My dad ran the general store, aka the only store in town, now that Joja's gone, so sooner or later I saw everyone. 

Leah, who moved to the the cabin by Marnie's a few years ago, and hardly seemed to come out, but could always be heard banging away at her creations when you walked by.

Elliott, the recluse on the beach, who spoke in that stilted, formal way of his, and could hardly talk to you for five minutes without developing that far-away look in his eyes, like he was thinking about something else. 

And yeah, Em, the new girl who took over the old, weedy farm out west. That first spring, she was hesitantly picking out one packet of parsnip seeds at a time. Within a few years, she was like clockwork, galloping to town at the start of each season, frantically swiping whole shelves clean of seeds, sprouts, and starters, and racing back to presumably cram a plant on every available inch of her property. 

One time she sold my dad over a thousand eggplant parmesans - god knows where she got all the eggplants, since they weren't even in season. We, and the rest of the town, were eating it for weeks. Eventually my dad started selling them at cost just to get rid of them.

Okay, so I had noticed her, but not with any particular interest. Nothing happened in the valley. It wasn't hard to stand out. 

It was only when I spotted her in the mountains that I started to really take note. I was coming back from Sebastian's and paused by the lake as I usually do. Across the water, the entrance to the old mines beckoned invitingly. I had been in there a number of times, catching frogs, collecting rocks, but never past the mouth of the cave, always with light of the outside world still warming my back. I could hear things moving around deeper inside, underground. Bats, and slimes, and if you believed the rumors, even monsters and spirits on the lower levels. I wouldn't have minded seeing a monster myself, but I had never even made it past the bats. The mines had been abandoned as long as I'd been alive. I supposed if there were monsters breeding down there, it was their territory now. The longer it sat abandoned, moldering, the more dangerous it would get, and the less likely it was that humans would ever step foot inside—

And that's when I saw her. One minute I was alone with my brooding, the next Em burst out from the cave. She looked slightly worse for wear, scratches on her arms, hair a-mess, but if she was moving quickly, it didn't look like anything was chasing her; it was just her normal, coffee-sped walking pace. As I watched, she put away an enormous sword and began to look around in confusion. 

"Milo? Milo?" she called. I could have told her that there was no one else around. "Oh shoot, I think I parked in town."

As she turned to go back into the mines, she spotted me across the lake, staring like a fool, and waved. "Abigail, isn't it? How you doing?" She looked a little worried when I didn't respond. "You okay?"

"How did you... When did... What about the bats?" I blurted out.

"What's that?" she called back, voice echoing across the water. "I thought I left my horse here but I think he's by Clint's. Forgot I took the mine cart here. I'm just gonna hop back on."

"The mine carts are totally unsafe—" I stopped myself, realizing I sounded just like my mom. It didn't matter anyway. She was already gone.

* * *

I thought about it for weeks, sometimes going to the mine entrance in person, standing where she'd stood, sometimes visiting in my thoughts and dreams. I knew I had to get in there, but as the weeks wore on I also became convinced I couldn't do it alone.

At the edge of Em's property, I paused to catch my breath. She really lived out in the middle of nowhere. Behind me, a line of footprints in the snow and ice marked my long progress up from town. Before me, a farm in winter, looking no different than any other patch of land under a featureless blanket of snow. 

There was a rhythmic chopping sound, and I followed it to a grove of trees, where she was felling them one by one. When she paused to take a sip of coffee, I said "Hi," and was rewarded with a scream and a coffee spit-take.

"Jeez, Abigail, where did you come from?" She looked over my shoulder as if expecting to see a horde of people behind me.

"I want to go to the mines with you." 

Em, who was just starting to recover enough to take another sip, spat out her coffee again.

I knew how this went. I went into the arguments I had prepared, in the tone I had developed over long years of doing battle with my mom. "Now don't say it's too dangerous. I can take care of myself. I'm an adult."

"Aw, hell, I wasn't going to say that," said Em, waving me off. "I'm not the boss of you. I hardly even know you."

"Then what were you going to say?"

She hefted her axe again. "Are you armed?"

"Armed?"

She began to chop the next tree. "We're going to have to buy you a sword."

"Then... you'll take me?"

"Sure." Chop.

"You're not going to tell me how dangerous it is?"

"Nope." Chop.

"You'll take me the next time you go?"

"Sure." Chop.

"Okay then. Good. Do that." I watched her chop for a while.

"Why aren't you in the mines now?" If it were me, I'd be there every chance I got. Maybe it was old hat to her, maybe she'd already seen it all.

"Oh, the spirits are in a bad mood today," she said absently, clearing out the stump now. "The TV told me. I'll go when they're happier, I usually find better stuff that way."

"Spirits," I said flatly

"Sure! I've gotten friendly with them since I moved here. Look, some of them even help me out on the farm." She pointed to a bunch of little huts that I'd originally taken for sheds, albeit cute ones. "They live here and help pick my crops... now hang on..." She seemed to be looking at the huts with fresh eyes, or rather, she seemed to be staring at the sacks resting by the door of each hut, each tied with a purple ribbon. "It's winter... but they have stuff harvested for me... I must have forgotten to pick up my harvest all last season!" 

Laughing crazily, she ran over to the nearest sack, brushed off the snow, and opened it up. I could see mounds of cranberries, eggplants, and corn in there. Quality stuff, too, if my eyes weren't fooling me, and as the daughter of the general store owner, my eyes know their stuff. That one sack full of produce must have been worth upwards of a hundred thousand gold - and that just was what my dad would pay for it, wholesale. Em grabbed the whole lot in her arms, chuckling to herself the whole time, kicked open the shipping bin by her house, and casually lobbed it all in. "Mayor Lewis comes by and picks this stuff up for me," she explained, resting the lid gently on the bulging contents. "Boy is he going to be surprised today."

* * *

A few days later, true to her word, Em came riding up the mountain. When she saw me waiting at the mine entrance, she gave a nerdy thumbs up. The spirits must have been in a good mood today.

When she swung off her horse and reached for her pack, I ran up to help her with it, and nearly dropped it when I felt how heavy it was.

"What's in this, rocks?"

Em looked up, an uncomfortable expression on her face that instantly piqued my interest. "Oh uh, it's actually--"

Snatching it away, or rather dragging it, I opened the flap, and came face to face with an improbable amount of blueberries, hundreds of them, glistening wetly within. Was there anything else in there? I was starting to get concerned.

"I had a good crop this summer," Em said, hastily taking the pack from me. "And mining really takes it out of you, so it's an easy, convenient snack. But I am looking for rocks too, for another project of mine. So I wouldn't mind leaving with a bag full of rocks..."

I took a few steps back and bumped into her horse, who neighed softly in admonition. I suddenly noticed that the horse was wearing a hat. A fedora, if I wasn't mistaken. The concern deepened, but it was far too late.

Within a few minutes we were descending the ladder. We dropped down and suddenly we were underneath the ground. I imagined another Abigail, a younger Abigail, wandering in above our heads and staring longingly at that ladder down. A budding sense of excitement was slowly pushing everything else aside as I imagined how deep we'd go, how many wonders we'd uncover in the vast depths below.

We began walking in what seemed to be a random direction. It was cold, a little damp, but not too dark. There were torches on the walls, conveniently, and no sign of any creatures yet, just us, the sound of our footsteps, and my breathing, which sounded too loud and fast in my own ears. I blamed it on the echo. 

Not five feet in, we came to an abrupt halt. A wall of stone blocked our way forward, and behind us, I could still see the ladder we'd come down on. 

"That's it?" I said.

"Not to fear!" Em put away her sword, which I hadn't seen her draw, and swapped it for a pickaxe in shimmering purple. I backed up hastily as she began to hack at the wall. To my surprise, it gave easily to her swings, and as we started moving again, she was clearing the rocks almost faster than we could walk through them. 

"I thought you've been down here before. Why is it all closed off?"

"It's weird, the mines seem to shift and change a lot. The layout is never the same when I come in here the next day. I guess rocks must fall from the ceiling sometimes?" 

I very carefully didn't look up.

"Every time, I have to carve a new path for myself, and re-find those ladders that go down. It's kind of a pain, but at least I usually find a couple good veins of ore or jewels along the way. Maybe we'll find something nice for you to take home. Look!"

I looked up at first, scanning the corners of the ceiling for falling rocks, or bats, but she gestured downward. There, in the floor, was another opening, with another ladder leading downward. We'd cleared our first floor.

* * *

A couple floors below, we found rails, the tracks of some defunct mine cart.

"I have a theory that this used to be a coal mine," said Em conversationally, as she carved through solid rock. She wasn't even breathing heavily. "Sometimes I find abandoned carts on these tracks, filled with coal. Makes me wonder why it was abandoned. Or why they didn't take the rest of the coal with them. Your family has lived here a long time, right? Do you know if this used to be a coal town?"

But I wasn't listening, at least, not to her. 

"Abigail?"

I shushed her. "You never bought me a sword," I said, suddenly urgent.

"Oh yeah! I totally forgot. We should have stopped by the Adventurer's Guild, but they open so late--"

I shushed her again. "Don't you hear that?"

"Hmm?"

"That sound!" Wings. Leathery ones, a sound that still made up a good percentage of my nightmares, years later. 

"Oh, a bat? Don't worry, just stand still."

Taking her own advice, she too stood still, but she had a sword to defend herself. I thought about asking for her pickaxe, but she seemed to be listening intently now, as if she could pinpoint the direction the bat was coming from. "It's no good chasing after them," she said, tone calm as a yoga instructor. "You have to let them come to you." Abruptly, she swiped her blade, a dim purple arc in the torchlight. A bat fell out of thin air, now hardly more than a pair of wings, which she picked up and bagged. At my expression, she shrugged. "Could come in handy."

"You killed it in one shot!" I said, awed despite myself. "That was so... zen. Like a samurai."

"A samurai?"

"Yeah, Sebastian is into that stuff."

"Sebastian, eh? I hear you talk about that boy a lot." She waggled her eyebrows. "Something going on there?"

"No, no, it's not like that," I protested. "We just grew up together. We're friends." Such thoughts had occurred to me too, and I'd always pushed them away in the past. I wasn't about to deal with them for the first time in front of a crazy farmer, in a cave smelling of guano. 

Em laughed, and thankfully changed the subject. "Well, I've always thought it would be cool to be a samurai. This sword definitely changed my life. I met her in the desert... well, it's a long story." She smiled fondly at the blade... a female, apparently. "All I can say is, exploring the mines has gotten a lot easier with her watching my back."

"I bet." I shuddered. "I had a bad experience with bats. That's probably why I never made it down here on my own before."

Em laid a hand on my shoulder. It would have been more comforting if she hadn't still been holding up that giant sword. "Bats aren't actually so bad. There's colony of them that lives on my farm. They bring me presents. Fruits."

I shuddered. "Remind me never to go back to your farm then. Or eat your fruits."

Em laughed, not unkindly. "I guess we all have our bad experiences. Mine was with those shadow brutes you see in the lower levels," she said, as if everyone would have been down to the lower levels already, and know what the hell a shadow brute was. "Before I had this sword, it was tough. You hardly see them until they're right in your face, and then they're charging right at you, dark, relentless..." she trailed off, gazing somewhere in the distance. I couldn't help but follow her gaze, but didn't see anything. But that was kind of the point, wasn't it? 

She shook herself out of it. "But those shadow guys aren't so bad either. One of my best friends is a shadow brute." This last was said casually, as she pulled out her pickaxe to began to carve us a way through the cave once more. "Sweet thing. Once sold me eggplant parmesan for only 50 gold." 

"No way." 

She mistook my horror. "Yeah! I couldn't believe it! Must have bought like a thousand of those things. I knew I shouldn't, but I it was such a steal."

"My dad must've felt the same way," I muttered. He'd bought them from Em at 200 gold apiece, to resell for 400, a fact he later would often repeat, when my mom was complaining. It had seemed like a steal to him too, at first.

"What?"

"Nothing."

She laughed. "Well, it's just a good thing your dad has such a big freezer, that's all I'm saying!"

I gritted my teeth and hurried after her, trying not to remember the taste of it, night after night.

We made good progress. Occasionally she'd drop the pickaxe for her sword, and kill a bat or a slime. One time, after the ground had turned gritty under our boots, I stepped forward and some kind of mole burst out from under my feet. She killed it immediately but there was still a scratch and a sharp stinging pain where it had gotten my ankle. 

"What if it has a disease or something?" I'd bent down to clutch the wound. "Maybe I should go visit the clinic—"

I looked up and Em was standing there with a handful of blueberries. 

"What are you..."

"Just eat these," she said, thrusting the handful at me again. "You'll feel better."

Stunned, I couldn't think what else to do but let go of my leg and take them. To be fair, they were good and fresh, even though she said she'd harvested them months ago. Each one burst sweetly in my mouth, a pop of forgotten summer sunshine. I was starting to feel better when I realized how far ahead she'd gotten with her pickaxe.

I opened my mouth to call out, but she broke through the rock in front of her and water gushed out. No, not water: slimes, a whole mass of them, oozing out with surprising speed. Thankfully they hadn't noticed me yet, but they surrounded Em, who was slashing left and right. Each swing connected with a squish, less out of precision and more because she practically couldn't swing without hitting something. I stamped on one that got a little too close to me, but my stomp just bounced, and when my boot came up the slime was clinging to it and seemed like it might devour the whole thing, and my foot with it.

"Em!" I called. She had finished all hers and was scooping up the slime. What the hell was she going to do with that?

"Whoops, missed one!" said Em, and hastily slashed it off my shoe. We stared at the ground where it pooled, dead, for some time, before Em took a sharp breath.

"Though actually slimes aren't so bad—"

"If you're going to tell me you're friends with a slime..." I warned. I had liked these boots. I began wiping them furiously with my handkerchief.

"Oh no. I actually breed some. On my farm. But even after all these generations, after watering and caring for them daily, those slimes will still jump me as soon as look at me. It hurts, and I don't mean my feelings, I mean the acid."

I began wiping harder.

"They sure aren't domestic animals. Should probably scrap that project. But I've gotten kind of attached..."

I couldn't think of where to start. "You _breed_ these things—?"

"Ooh, look at this," without any indication of what "this" was, she suddenly ran off. 

"Hey, wait!" I called, but by this point I knew better than to expect her to wait. I began to put the handkerchief away, then thought better of it and dropped it. I caught up to her as she was digging something out of the ground. "Is that...?"

She held it up to the light of the nearest torch, and its rough-hewn edges glittered unevenly, a whole rainbow of purples light and dark shimmering in her hand. 

"It's... beautiful," I breathed, slimes and boots forgotten. I had only seen polished amethyst before, in jewelry, and stores. This was was amethyst in the wild, raw and untamed. I'd never seen anything like it in the safety of the valley.

"I thought you might like it," she said with satisfaction, and handed it to me. "A souvenir of our little trip. Maybe we can do this again some time."

"Are... are you sure?" I took it gently, as though it was something fragile, when I had just seen Em chisel it out of the ground with her pickaxe. "Don't you want it?"

"Oh, I'm just here for my bag of rocks." 

I laughed at first, thinking she was kidding, but sure enough, she began to gather the loose rocks into her bag. Then I just laughed harder.

**Author's Note:**

> Maybe next time they'll hit Skull Caverns together.
> 
> Album of people complaining about my eggplant parm: https://imgur.com/a/mjBPNKy


End file.
